Palm Beach police foiled plot to kill JFK

Last week, we told you about retired postal worker Richard Paul Pavlick’s plot to murder president-elect John F. Kennedy in Palm Beach in December 1960.

Pavlick had driven to Florida with the idea of ramming JFK’s motorcade as it headed for Mass at St. Edward’s Catholic Church.

He’d aborted one attempt after seeing Kennedy’s wife and two small children.

Authorities following a tip had been watching for the 1950 Buick with New Hampshire plates.

Lester Free, an officer with the Palm Beach police, spotted it on the North Bridge at 9 p.m. Dec. 15, and fellow officers, along with Secret Service agents, swarmed it and pulled Pavlick out.

It turned out the “grandfatherly type” with white hair had filled his trunk with seven sticks of dynamite and a detonator. A Secret Service photo (below) shows the Buick and its deadly cargo.

Photo provided by Secret Service

Pavlick had three more sticks and more detonating equipment in his motel room.

“He talked very rationally. He had it all planned. I’m certain he was capable of doing it,” Free told The Palm Beach Times in 1972.

Free later would leave Palm Beach to become part of a four-man force in Juno Beach.

Pavlick had been convinced the Kennedy family had bought the election, and in his car was a letter to the American people, saying in part, “I decided that never would the presidency of the United States be up for sale.”

Pavlick later was found incompetent to face charges and was sent to a medical center in Missouri. He bounced around psychiatric hospitals for six years until charges eventually were dropped.

By then, another man, Lee Harvey Oswald, had accomplished from the window of a Dallas schoolbook warehouse what Pavlick had failed to do.

In the 1970s, Pavlick still was sending dozens of letters proclaiming his innocence to everyone from the White House to Congress to the media. Pavlick died at 88 in 1975 in a veterans’ hospital in Manchester, N.H. He’d outlived by three years Lester Free, the police officer who’d saved the life of a president.

Read more about the incident in an article by Stuart writer Alice L. Luckhardt in the October 2010 edition of Florida Monthly Magazine.

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